On a recent afternoon during February’s cold snap, Margarita Cabrera leans over a late-model John Deere tractor, screwing a small bolt into the machine’s frame. Long black hair waterfalling over her face, she works with the assurance of a seasoned mechanic, intimate with every aspect of the model 790.

Which she is. But Cabrera is no wrench jockey; this Deere won’t be hauling compost.

The 37-year-old El Paso artist, whose beguiling body of work explores economic and cultural relationships between Mexico and the United States, was assembling “Arbol de la Vida (John Deere Model #790),” a full-sized, minutely detailed replica of the tractor — in light brown, earthy clay from Acatlán, Puebla — from molds of actual parts. (Cabrera bought a Deere and had it disassembled.)

Covered with kiln-fired flowers, birds and butterflies, Cabrera’s clay tractor harkens back to the creation myths of the ancient Olmecs while sending a modern message about a U.S. agricultural system that relies on migrant labor while our government simultaneously cracks down on immigration.

“Arbol” is a cornerstone piece in “New Image Sculpture,” a seductive, sometimes discombobulating, frequently humorous new exhibition at the McNay Art Museum featuring objects such as Cabrera’s tractor/not tractor that confound us at every turn with visual trickery, homemade craft and artistic obsession.

The brainchild of McNay curator René Barilleaux, “New Image Sculpture” features the work of 13 artists and artist collectives from all over the country producing work — with bows to the Dada, Pop and minimalist movements — that goes directly to our notions of what constitutes art.

Why, for example, make a boombox of Plexiglas and vinyl that looks pretty much like a boombox — as Brooklyn artist Kevin Landers has done here?

In her lean, insightful catalog essay, critic and art historian Eleanor Heartney offers a compelling explanation: “Taken together, new image sculptures offer compelling meditations on the meaning of labor, the creation of value, the construction of personal and social identity and the nature of art.”

Referencing the work of critic Arthur Danto, whose epiphany came in the ’60s with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, Heartney adds: “With respect to the latter, they confirm Danto’s notion that art is not a function of the way an object looks, or even of its inherent aesthetic qualities. Rather, something becomes art when it contributes to the ongoing discussion about art’s place in the world and the way it shapes our understanding of the meanings and purpose of life.

“These works reveal the many ways that we are entangled with the objects that surround us. . . . By shining a spotlight on the world of objects, so often hidden in plain sight, and remaking them out of unexpected materials, the artists evoke the world of desire, dread, nostalgia and comedy that envelops us all the time.”

The McNay, whose rich permanent collection charts the course of modern sculpture from Rodin to Leonardo Drew, is taking a giant step with “New Image Sculpture,” made possible, at least in part, by the dynamic Stieren Center addition. “New Image Sculpture” fills the Stieren Center with objects that manage to be at once mundane and miraculous. Three installations were commissioned specially for the exhibition.

“ ‘New Image Sculpture’ explores a recent direction in contemporary American art — albeit one with roots in radical, early 20th-century developments — and presents a fascinating counterpoint to the collage and assemblage tradition so well represented at the McNay,” says museum director William Chiego. “Rather than employing found objects from the real world combined to create something wholly new, the artists of ‘New Image Sculpture’ interpret objects from the real world as aesthetic objects removed from their original function. Their works question our common understanding of what is real and further expand the definition of sculpture.”

As he explains: “About five years ago, I began to see work in disparate places — art fairs, museum exhibitions, galleries, studios — that shared similar characteristics: subjects drawn from the real world, from everyday life, but generally of ordinary objects; compulsive fabrication techniques; the use of ephemeral and basic materials, like cardboard and vinyl and Styrofoam; and an association with handicraft, hobby art and folk art.”

Something, says Barilleaux, was “definitely in the air.”

“These artists were separated by geography, age, background, but there was a synergy, a consistency about all these artists,” he says. “The ‘movement’ was significant and needed to be identified.”

Barilleaux compiled a list of 30 or 40 artists working along similar lines.

“I cast a wide net, but then I focused on artists whose body of work was going in this direction,” he says. “Some artists might have one or two works but then go in a different direction.”

The first work we encounter in “New Image Sculpture” is the commissioned installation “Multi-station Machine” by Okay Mountain, an Austin-based collective of 10 artists. A clever work that anyone with a gym membership will relate to, the ominously lighted “Machine” speaks to our culture’s obsession with fitness in the face of our high obesity rates. The artists have built an exercise station out of dark, scarred wood, rope (the cables) and rock (the weights) that looks as if it might have been used in the Spanish Inquisition. A nearby exercycle has a pointed seat. Ouch.

Another installation created for the McNay show is Mark Schatz’s “I Was Going to Stop the Earth But It Won’t Stop Moving.” A Denver native, Schatz has created a series of Earth models of carved white Styrofoam, as if a crane gouged out a large chunk of the planet and placed it on a tall black pedestal. The surface topography is roughly rendered in model foliage, reflecting a facsimile of the natural world, broken up occasionally by man-made structures such as water towers and transmission towers.

Educated at the universities of Michigan and Texas, Schatz moved his family to New Orleans shortly before Katrina, only to flee its devastation.

“Travel, movement, location, relocation, space and the sense of place — these themes pervade the artist’s life as well as inspire his art,” Barilleaux says.

Berkeley, Calif., artist Libby Black’s reconstructions of Louis Vuitton luggage (“You Never Call, You Never Write,” 2006) and other luxury items — Chanel perfume bottles and Prada shoes — reflect a fascination and concern with the absurdity of designer culture. Black “appropriates the language and iconography of wealth and power, transforming it with paper, paint and a lot of hot glue,” Barilleaux says.

Laced with irony, these works approximate expensive fashion desirables in the cheapest material, calling into question their intrinsic value.

Brooklyn artist Jade Townsend’s down-the-rabbit-hole installation “Between Here and There” is, in Barilleaux’s words, a “three-dimensional comment on the American Dream.” Inside a typical American dream home, its four walls exploded out, a giant baby resembling Richard Nixon sits atop the detritus and clutter of our lives, from lamps to stereo components — all built of plain, unstained wood. In the back, a mechanical element features two old geezers in tux tails poking each other’s eyes out with garish red fists. Townsend’s dark view is theatrical, phantasmagorical.

Los Angeles artist Kaz Oshiro practices the art of deception with his hyper-realistic sculptures of everyday objects such as guitar amplifiers and trash cans, constructed of painted canvas stretched over frames. Viewers can walk behind these objects and realize they are empty shells of themselves, the magician’s trick revealed.

• The team of Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, who carve replicas of objects — “Soap Box” is a podium with a spiky profusion of microphones — in pastel blue and green foam.

• Dennis Harper, who “straddles reality and illusion,” Barilleaux says, with his foam board objects and environments — “The One Certainty” is an innocuous bathroom with oversized fixtures (toilet, sink, etc.), with the artist captured rather bizarrely on video in the medicine cabinet mirror.

• Kiel Johnson, who creates objects such as cameras and musical instruments and a “survival suit” (sort of pushing the envelope on the Batman utility belt) out of chipboard.

• And Kevin Landers, who makes reasonable facsimiles of household objects, such as Mr. Coffees, of materials like plexiglass and Formica.

“Some artists are drawn to the pleasure of visual trickery,” Heartney, a contributing editor to Art in America, writes. “Like magicians, new image sculptors convey the sense that the hand is faster, or in this case more cunning, than the eye.”

In the process of fabricating these objects, new image sculptors raise the question, “What do our objects mean to us?”